I’ve been listening to this Finnish lady for a few years now and I have to say that she has developed from being one of the best Finnish musicians I have heard to being one of the best musicians I have heard.
Her guitar playing has developed in leaps and bounds – she was always a fine slide guitarist but now her overall playing is superb and when she plays a dark fuzzed riff, as she does on ‘Diamonds On The Road’, it has total conviction. The production on this album has created a huge soundscape, a sense of space and, especially, depth and fitted some of the best songs she has written in her 12 album career.
I get the feeling that these songs are very personal to her but they also cover universal themes of love and loss so I found that they are easy to relate to. There is also a strong sense of the music being created in close conjunction to her bandmates – none of the stretches between players you sometimes hear on albums where the different musicians are ‘dialled in’ to the project. The lady herself says of it: “ My drummer Iiro Laitinen and bassist Tatu Back are doing a fantastic job. We practised the songs a lot before going to the studio, which you can really hear on the tracks. My long-term keyboardist Harri Taittonen joined on the album, which was a real treat," she says. “I also wanted to improve my guitar chops and guitar skills, so I was practising a lot, exploring different guitarists and their technics. I wanted to make a guitar album, with lots of guitar solos and interesting guitar parts, and a lot of slide guitar of course. In some of the songs, I have played over twenty different guitar tracks, and the whole album sounds huge.”
Essentially, it is an album that is just good to listen to. The playing is excellent and Lyytinen herself has found new personalities within her music – the coquettishness of ‘Love Bites’ for example.
